The Product Category (or Internal Category as it is called in V8) is used to define the default expense and income accounts (and stock accounts for valuation). You can define a product category according to the way in which you want to see your turnover in Odoo, e.g. to replace separate income / expense accounts. Usually, you create the product categories from an accounting / reporting point of view.

The Public Product Categories are used to group products on your website. These categories are not the same as the product categories, because they tend to be created from a different point of view. The way in which you display your reporting, does not necessarily comply with the way you want to classify products for your customers.

Example: you define a Product Category Printers. On your website, however, you would like your customers to be able to search for laser printers, inkjet printers, etc. Therefore, you define Public Product Categories to make this classification work.

The Pos Product Categories are used to classify your products in your point of sale. The categories you define, will be displayed at the top of your POS screen.

Product Categories are mandatory in Odoo. For the other two categories, you can choose to use or to not use them. They have to be created separately, but you can import them from a csv file. The structure can be as simple or as complex as you like or need.

This is the most ridiculous design logic I have ever seen! Now I have to go back and assign Public and POS product categories to each of 300+ items in our database! Product/Internal Category (found under "Accounting" tab in Warehouse > Products) should be used for website and POS by default unless specified in those fields! Afterall, a product assigned as "Dog Food" under Internal/Product category is unlikely to be "Cat Food" under Public/POS category!

Your comment on the design logic shows me that you did not understand Els's very good explanation or you do not know real world examples which do have more than dog food and cat food as categories. It needs more effort though as long as you do not write some code to make it easier in your particular case.

Ermin, we are pet supplies business and the example used is ligitimate in our case. Clearly you prefer inefficiency and triple-handling! Please explain why the current design is best when you want to use POS and have a webstore? Assigning the same category across 3 separate product fields! I haven't even talk about the synchronisation between those separate categories after you have added/removed a category!

Odoo (as any other ERP system which offers enough flexibility to cover more than simple business models) is not a pet supplies business solution and it is not a preconfigured simple purchase/store/sell process solution. Of course this is not really convenient in a simple business model, but you are free to define your own module/customization to fit your particular business needs and to make the process of entering and maintaining data easier.

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